Justices Deal Utah a Setback In Its Bid to Gain a House Seat

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The Supreme Court today upheld the Census Bureau's refusal last year to count Mormon missionaries or other nongovernment American workers living overseas. The policy cost Utah, a state with a large number of missionaries, a chance to pick up a fourth House seat in the reallocation that followed the 2000 census.

Ruling summarily in a suit that Utah brought against the Census Bureau and the bureau's parent, the Department of Commerce, the justices offered no comment on the case.

They simply affirmed without opinion a ruling last April by a special three-judge federal district court in Salt Lake City, which held that there was no constitutional or statutory basis for Utah's challenge to the Census Bureau's decision to count military and civilian federal employees but no other Americans living abroad.

By excluding Utah's 11,176 Mormon missionaries abroad, the 2000 census left the state 857 people short of the number it needed for an added seat in the House of Representatives.

The beneficiary was North Carolina, which with only 107 Mormon missionaries overseas but thousands of residents serving abroad in the military ended up the winner of the final House seat to be allocated on the basis of the new census. After Utah filed its lawsuit in January, North Carolina intervened in the case to protect its victory, which increased its House delegation to 13 representatives from 12.

Raymond A. Hintze, Utah's chief civil deputy attorney general, said in an interview today that while the state was ''extremely disappointed'' with the outcome of its lawsuit, it was not yet ready to give up its fight for a fourth seat. Earlier this month, Utah filed a Supreme Court appeal in a second, so far unsuccessful, challenge to the Census Bureau, this one to the technique known as ''whole person imputation,'' which the bureau uses to assign a number of residents to a dwelling where census takers have not been able to perform an actual head count.

Under this technique, the bureau assigns the number of residents whom it knows to be living at the nearest dwelling. Mr. Hintze said that in Utah's view, this was a form of statistical sampling, which the Supreme Court has ruled is not to be used for the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives.

In the missionary case that the Supreme Court decided today, Utah v. Evans, No. 01-283, the state sought any of three alternatives: count all Americans temporarily residing abroad; count none; or count those who, like Mormon missionaries, had retained their ties to their home states and could readily be traced through administrative records. In this respect, Utah said, the missionaries were like federal employees. The state maintained that it would have been entitled to a fourth seat under any of the three circumstances.

The district court did not dispute this but concluded that there was no basis for any of the state's demands. The missionary population was not like federal employees, the court said, because a ''hugely disproportionate number'' of Mormon missionaries, 46 percent, were from Utah, while the population of federal employees overseas was more evenly distributed from among the American population at large.

The district court relied on a 1992 Supreme Court decision, Franklin v. Massachusetts, that upheld the Census Bureau's decision for the 1990 census to allocate only federal military and civilian personnel and not other overseas Americans.

Utah's suit was joined by four Utah residents who were serving as Mormon missionaries. The plaintiffs argued that the government's refusal to count the missionaries imposed a burden on Mormon religious practice that was both illegal under a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The district court rejected the religious claims on the ground that the state had not shown that the Mormons' practice of religion or religious beliefs was ''burdened in any way'' by the decision not to count the missionaries.

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A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 15 of the National edition with the headline: Justices Deal Utah a Setback In Its Bid to Gain a House Seat. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe